I think there are several conclusions you could come to:
The book (or mathematics) is wrong
The universe is not a deterministic system
Random numbers do not exist
I would lean towards 2 - aren't quantum processes such as radioactive decay non-deterministic? This seems to be a matter of opinion, even among great physicists. If, however you hold that the universe is deterministic, I suppose you would have to come to the conclusion that nothing is entirely random.
As a side not, noise does not imply non-determinism: gaussian white noise, for example, is entirely deterministic (depending on the above;-) ), and is generated in a system where a large number of "random" events summed together contribute to the whole. For example chaotic movements of electrons in a hot conductor giving rise to electrical noise. In such a case, the noise is in practice unpredictable, so is treated as non-deterministic.
You lower the rope from the space station in geosynchronous orbit then tether the bottom to a ground station (in this case floating in the ocean). You also need a counter balance beyond geosynchronous orbit to keep the whole thing in tension.
Convince your boss and colleagues that you are a whitespace guru. When your code doesn't work, blame it on other people. If you can keep them so busy trying to interface with your code, they won't have time to talk to each other, and you can manipulate them into bypassing your code completely. It will be noted that you are the only one in the team who finished ahead of schedule, and you will be well on your way to a position in the company where you don't need to know anything.
If you are at all religeous, you probably believe that some sort of deity created life on Earth.
I'm not
Therefore, said deity must have planned most major species, or at least helped guide them along.
This doesn't follow at all. If you believe in a grand architect of the universe, the obvious conclusion for anyone who has studied the universe, would be that god simply wrote the rulebook.
It would kind of suck to have the world overrun with teenage mutant ninja lemmings, who cleared out everything else first, then killed themselves. So any time something like that might have happened, there would have been a deity to stop it.
Not true. Such a species would cause massive population loss in its prey, before suffering massive population loss in its own species due to starvation. Eventually, everything would stabilise, perhaps after the extinction of one or more species, possibly the new predator. This situation has been observed when a species has been introduced to a new ecosystem.
And in a related note, good and evil are fallacies since what is good or bad is wholly dependent upon the perspective of the observer
This is why I used the term "held to be good". The question is, is it reasonable to hold the opinion that destroying a species is bad, while simultaneously holding that creating one is bad. And on a related note, the question of whether morality is subjective or objective is also a matter of perspective, which disqualifies you from from stating the above as if it were true.
It is commonly held that a species becoming extinct is bad. Does it therefore follow that creating a new species through genetic engineering is good? If not, why not?
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a german colleague. He suggested that the whole matter could be sorted out if Bush and Hussein had a gunfight at dawn.
Yeah right! What they mean is that there was something phallic looking in the picture. Or maybe this is part of the movement to stop the publication of scientific findings which might be useful to terrorists. Either that, or they didn't want us to know about the alien civilisation they're waging a secret war against. Is nothing sacred?
Face it, it's up to the Linux and *BSD distributions to pick and choose which applications, utilities, GUI's etc. get provided
I think this is the real problem. It should be up to the distribution providers, who want to sell linux, to take care of all the problems he talks about. It is the distributions which are "The Operating System", not the entire output of the open source community. The problem is that they all want to provide a CD set with X thousand applications on it, rather than a carefully selected suite which will do 99% of what anyone wants.
Every time I read such comments about privacy, I wish that George Orwell's 1984 was made obligatory reading in schools.
That wouldn't make any difference. People routinely bring up 1984 whenever invasion of privacy issues are brought up in the UK, and the general response is always that they are massively over reacting. It's not that people are ignorant about the book - even most of the people who haven't read it know the jist of what it's about, it's just that they can't make the connection between the book and reality. After all, 1984 has been and gone, so George Orwell was wrong in his predictions.
Those were the days - cell phones which didn't get lost down the back of the couch and could double as a lethal weapon. Not like the girly things you get these days. Back in those days, the designers understood that a cell phone is an extension of your manhood, and made them with presence. And they call it progress! I don't know....
If your target is a BMP 1km away moving laterally with respect to shooter-target axis you WILL need to adjust for this when firing with an ordinary projectile weapon. You can't count on your targets standing still for you, on calm days.
That's all very well in theory, but holywood aside, shooting a moving target 50m away is very difficult - that's why shot guns were invented. 1km? your average infantryman? Forget it.
* silent
This one uses supersonic gas discharges, which would not be silent.
* no recoil
it has more recoil than a conventional rifle - see above
* less resupply problems (lay a power cable to the forward camp instead of moving trucks full of ammo)
It uses a polonium power cell, which can't be recharged. Resupply is still needed (although possibly not so often).
* more accuracy due to a reduce "time to impact" (from pulling the trigger to impact, it's half a second at 500 yards)
What does time to impact have to do with accuracy? It's not as if people can dodge bullets. The increase in accuracy comes from the lack of tragectory, which means you don't need to account for range.
The vast majority of bullets used in infantry combat are used to keep the enemy's heads down until someone can get close enough to kill them. This means you need loud bangs and puffs of dust, so the enemy knows it's dangerous. The only soldier's who rely on sharp-shooting to kill are snipers. On the other hand, I look forward to seeing parading in their mirror suits - it'll be oh so pretty. What baffles me is why they're proposing this as an infantry weapon, and not a large scale version for fighter aircraft and the like, which have they're own power source and integrated targetting systems. This would be lethal in dogfights.
This source code is subject to the U.S. Export Administration Regulations and other U.S. law, and may not be exported or re-exported to certain countries (currently Afghanistan (Taliban controlled areas), Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria)
They forgot France, Germany and Turkey.
p.s. Taliban controlled areas? I thought the Taliban had been defeated.
What does he expect. If you go sailing around the carribean, stealing gold from the spaniards while waving a cutlass and crying "shiver me timbers", you can expect the authorities to try you on piracy charges. The sooner we send this scourge of the seaways to Davy Jones' locker, the better. Hang him from the yard arm, I say!
Come on, it's obviously an april fools joke. I can't believe you all fell for it. "Red Hat Linux"? It's obviusly just a piss take of Yellow Hat Linux. They even ripped off the logo.
Personally... I want one that attaches to my car. Just stop off at the nearest farm, grab a few turkeys... toss in a garborator, and extract fuel.
Better still you could mount an industrial strength combined scoop/blender on the front of your bonnet to mash up the organic matter and pump it into the garborator. Then, whenever you got low on fuel, you could just drive through the nearest turkey field/protest march/whatever to fill up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are several conclusions you could come to:
I would lean towards 2 - aren't quantum processes such as radioactive decay non-deterministic? This seems to be a matter of opinion, even among great physicists. If, however you hold that the universe is deterministic, I suppose you would have to come to the conclusion that nothing is entirely random.
As a side not, noise does not imply non-determinism: gaussian white noise, for example, is entirely deterministic (depending on the above ;-) ), and is generated in a system where a large number of "random" events summed together contribute to the whole. For example chaotic movements of electrons in a hot conductor giving rise to electrical noise. In such a case, the noise is in practice unpredictable, so is treated as non-deterministic.
I just keep thinking of divide by zero errors. Ouch!
WTFDTM?
How about converting it into bullets and scattering it across the lands of your enemies?
You lower the rope from the space station in geosynchronous orbit then tether the bottom to a ground station (in this case floating in the ocean). You also need a counter balance beyond geosynchronous orbit to keep the whole thing in tension.
It's about time they started using fission for space elevators. They were much too slow when they were coal fired.
Convince your boss and colleagues that you are a whitespace guru. When your code doesn't work, blame it on other people. If you can keep them so busy trying to interface with your code, they won't have time to talk to each other, and you can manipulate them into bypassing your code completely. It will be noted that you are the only one in the team who finished ahead of schedule, and you will be well on your way to a position in the company where you don't need to know anything.
I'm not
Therefore, said deity must have planned most major species, or at least helped guide them along.
This doesn't follow at all. If you believe in a grand architect of the universe, the obvious conclusion for anyone who has studied the universe, would be that god simply wrote the rulebook.
It would kind of suck to have the world overrun with teenage mutant ninja lemmings, who cleared out everything else first, then killed themselves. So any time something like that might have happened, there would have been a deity to stop it.
Not true. Such a species would cause massive population loss in its prey, before suffering massive population loss in its own species due to starvation. Eventually, everything would stabilise, perhaps after the extinction of one or more species, possibly the new predator. This situation has been observed when a species has been introduced to a new ecosystem.
This is why I used the term "held to be good". The question is, is it reasonable to hold the opinion that destroying a species is bad, while simultaneously holding that creating one is bad. And on a related note, the question of whether morality is subjective or objective is also a matter of perspective, which disqualifies you from from stating the above as if it were true.
It is commonly held that a species becoming extinct is bad. Does it therefore follow that creating a new species through genetic engineering is good? If not, why not?
That reminds me of a conversation I had with a german colleague. He suggested that the whole matter could be sorted out if Bush and Hussein had a gunfight at dawn.
Yeah right! What they mean is that there was something phallic looking in the picture. Or maybe this is part of the movement to stop the publication of scientific findings which might be useful to terrorists. Either that, or they didn't want us to know about the alien civilisation they're waging a secret war against. Is nothing sacred?
I think this is the real problem. It should be up to the distribution providers, who want to sell linux, to take care of all the problems he talks about. It is the distributions which are "The Operating System", not the entire output of the open source community. The problem is that they all want to provide a CD set with X thousand applications on it, rather than a carefully selected suite which will do 99% of what anyone wants.
That wouldn't make any difference. People routinely bring up 1984 whenever invasion of privacy issues are brought up in the UK, and the general response is always that they are massively over reacting. It's not that people are ignorant about the book - even most of the people who haven't read it know the jist of what it's about, it's just that they can't make the connection between the book and reality. After all, 1984 has been and gone, so George Orwell was wrong in his predictions.
If my PC would just stop having regular nervous breakdowns, I would be happy.
Those were the days - cell phones which didn't get lost down the back of the couch and could double as a lethal weapon. Not like the girly things you get these days. Back in those days, the designers understood that a cell phone is an extension of your manhood, and made them with presence. And they call it progress! I don't know....
That's all very well in theory, but holywood aside, shooting a moving target 50m away is very difficult - that's why shot guns were invented. 1km? your average infantryman? Forget it.
This one uses supersonic gas discharges, which would not be silent.
* no recoil
it has more recoil than a conventional rifle - see above
* less resupply problems (lay a power cable to the forward camp instead of moving trucks full of ammo)
It uses a polonium power cell, which can't be recharged. Resupply is still needed (although possibly not so often).
* more accuracy due to a reduce "time to impact" (from pulling the trigger to impact, it's half a second at 500 yards)
What does time to impact have to do with accuracy? It's not as if people can dodge bullets. The increase in accuracy comes from the lack of tragectory, which means you don't need to account for range.
The vast majority of bullets used in infantry combat are used to keep the enemy's heads down until someone can get close enough to kill them. This means you need loud bangs and puffs of dust, so the enemy knows it's dangerous. The only soldier's who rely on sharp-shooting to kill are snipers. On the other hand, I look forward to seeing parading in their mirror suits - it'll be oh so pretty. What baffles me is why they're proposing this as an infantry weapon, and not a large scale version for fighter aircraft and the like, which have they're own power source and integrated targetting systems. This would be lethal in dogfights.
They forgot France, Germany and Turkey.
p.s. Taliban controlled areas? I thought the Taliban had been defeated.
No. It shouldn't be pronounced that way either.
What does he expect. If you go sailing around the carribean, stealing gold from the spaniards while waving a cutlass and crying "shiver me timbers", you can expect the authorities to try you on piracy charges. The sooner we send this scourge of the seaways to Davy Jones' locker, the better. Hang him from the yard arm, I say!
Come on, it's obviously an april fools joke. I can't believe you all fell for it. "Red Hat Linux"? It's obviusly just a piss take of Yellow Hat Linux. They even ripped off the logo.
Better still you could mount an industrial strength combined scoop/blender on the front of your bonnet to mash up the organic matter and pump it into the garborator. Then, whenever you got low on fuel, you could just drive through the nearest turkey field/protest march/whatever to fill up.
Until I saw the picture. Nice one! Almost as funny as the iToilet